Read Spoon River Anthology Page 16


  Will you go through earth, O strong of soul,

  And through unnumbered heavens

  To the final flame!

  CAPTAIN ORLANDO KILLION

  OH, you young radicals and dreamers,

  You dauntless fledglings

  Who pass by my headstone,

  Mock not its record of my captaincy in the army

  And my faith in God!

  They are not denials of each other.

  Go by reverently, and read with sober care

  How a great people, riding with defiant shouts

  The centaur of Revolution,

  Spurred and whipped to frenzy,

  Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea

  Over the precipice they were nearing,

  And fell from his back in precipitate awe

  To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.

  Moved by the same sense of vast reality

  Of life and death, and burdened as they were

  With the fate of a race,

  How was I, a little blasphemer,

  Caught in the drift of a nation’s unloosened flood,

  To remain a blasphemer,

  And a captain in the army?

  JEREMY CARLISLE

  PASSER-BY, sin beyond any sin

  Is the sin of blindness of souls to other souls.

  And joy beyond any joy is the joy

  Of having the good in you seen, and seeing the good

  At the miraculous moment!

  Here I confess to a lofty scorn,

  And an acrid skepticism.

  But do you remember the liquid that Penniwit

  Poured on tintypes making them blue

  With a mist like hickory smoke?

  Then how the picture began to clear

  Till the face came forth like life?

  So you appeared to me, neglected ones,

  And enemies too, as I went along

  With my face growing clearer to you as yours

  Grew clearer to me.

  We were ready then to walk together

  And sing in chorus and chant the dawn

  Of life that is wholly life.

  JOSEPH DIXON

  WHO carved this shattered harp on my stone?

  I died to you, no doubt. But how many harps and pianos

  Wired I and tightened and disentangled for you,

  Making them sweet again—with tuning fork or without?

  Oh well! A harp leaps out of the ear of a man, you say,

  But whence the ear that orders the length of the strings

  To a magic of numbers flying before your thought

  Through a door that closes against your breathless wonder?

  Is there no Ear round the ear of a man, that it senses

  Through strings and columns of air the soul of sound?

  I thrill as I call it a tuning fork that catches

  The waves of mingled music and light from afar,

  The antennæ of Thought that listens through utmost space.

  Surely the concord that ruled my spirit is proof

  Of an Ear that tuned me, able to tune me over

  And use me again if I am worthy to use.

  JUDSON STODDARD

  ON a mountain top above the clouds

  That streamed like a sea below me

  I said that peak is the thought of Budda,

  And that one is the prayer of Jesus,

  And this one is the dream of Plato,

  And that one there the song of Dante,

  And this is Kant and this is Newton,

  And this is Milton and this is Shakespeare,

  And this the hope of the Mother Church,

  And this—why all these peaks are poems,

  Poems and prayers that pierce the clouds.

  And I said “What does God do with mountains

  That rise almost to heaven?”

  RUSSELL KINCAID

  IN the last spring I ever knew,

  In those last days,

  I sat in the forsaken orchard

  Where beyond fields of greenery shimmered

  The hills at Miller’s Ford;

  Just to muse on the apple tree

  With its ruined trunk and blasted branches,

  And shoots of green whose delicate blossoms

  Were sprinkled over the skeleton tangle,*

  Never to grow in fruit.

  And there was I with my spirit girded

  By the flesh half dead, the senses numb,

  Yet thinking of youth and the earth in youth,—

  Such phantom blossoms palely shining

  Over the lifeless boughs of Time.

  O earth that leaves us ere heaven takes us!

  Had I been only a tree to shiver

  With dreams of spring and a leafy youth,

  Then I had fallen in the cyclone

  Which swept me out of the soul’s suspense

  Where it’s neither earth nor heaven.

  AARON HATFIELD

  BETTER than granite, Spoon River,

  Is the memory-picture you keep of me

  Standing before the pioneer men and women

  There at Concord Church on Communion day.

  Speaking in broken voice of the peasant youth

  Of Galilee who went to the city

  And was killed by bankers and lawyers;

  My voice mingling with the June wind

  That blew over wheat fields from Atterbury;

  While the white stones in the burying ground

  Around the Church shimmered in the summer sun.

  And there, though my own memories

  Were too great to bear, were you, O pioneers,

  With bowed heads breathing forth your sorrow

  For the sons killed in battle and the daughters

  And little children who vanished in life’s morning,

  Or at the intolerable hour of noon.

  But in those moments of tragic silence,

  When the wine and bread were passed,

  Came the reconciliation for us—

  Us the ploughmen and the hewers of wood,

  Us the peasants, brothers of the peasant of Galilee—

  To us came the Comforter

  And the consolation of tongues of flame!*

  ISAIAH BEETHOVEN

  THEY told me I had three months to live,

  So I crept to Bernadotte,

  And sat by the mill for hours and hours

  Where the gathered waters deeply moving

  Seemed not to move:

  O world, that’s you!

  You are but a widened place in the river

  Where Life looks down and we rejoice for her

  Mirrored in us, and so we dream

  And turn away, but when again

  We look for the face, behold the low-lands

  And blasted cotton-wood trees where we empty

  Into the larger stream!

  But here by the mill the castled clouds

  Mocked themselves in the dizzy water;

  And over its agate floor at night

  The flame of the moon ran under my eyes

  Amid a forest stillness broken

  By a flute in a hut on the hill.

  At last when I came to lie in bed

  Weak and in pain, with the dreams about me,

  The soul of the river had entered my soul,

  And the gathered power of my soul was moving

  So swiftly it seemed to be at rest

  Under cities of cloud and under

  Spheres of silver and changing worlds—

  Until I saw a flash of trumpets

  Above the battlements over Time!

  ELIJAH BROWNING

  I WAS among multitudes of children

  Dancing at the foot of a mountain.

  A breeze blew out of the east and swept them as leaves,

  Driving some up the slopes. . . . All was changed.

  Here were flying lights, and mystic moons, and dream-music.


  A cloud fell upon us. When it lifted all was changed.

  I was now amid multitudes who were wrangling.

  Then a figure in shimmering gold, and one with a trumpet,

  And one with a sceptre stood before me.

  They mocked me and danced a rigadoon and vanished. . . .

  All was changed again. Out of a bower of poppies

  A woman bared her breasts and lifted her open

  mouth to mine.

  I kissed her. The taste of her lips was like salt.

  She left blood on my lips. I fell exhausted.

  I arose and ascended higher, but a mist as from an iceberg

  Clouded my steps. I was cold and in pain.

  Then the sun streamed on me again,

  And I saw the mists below me hiding all below them.

  And I, bent over my staff, knew myself

  Silhouetted against the snow. And above me

  Was the soundless air, pierced by a cone of ice,

  Over which hung a solitary star!

  A shudder of ecstasy, a shudder of fear

  Ran through me. But I could not return to the slopes—

  Nay, I wished not to return.

  For the spent waves of the symphony of freedom

  Lapped the ethereal cliffs about me.

  Therefore I climbed to the pinnacle.

  I flung away my staff.

  I touched that star

  With my outstretched hand.

  I vanished utterly.

  For the mountain delivers to Infinite Truth

  Whosoever touches the star!

  WEBSTER FORD*

  Do you remember, O Delphic Apollo,*

  The sunset hour by the river, when Mickey M’Grew

  Cried, “There’s a ghost,” and I, “It’s Delphic Apollo”

  And the son of the banker derided us, saying, “It’s light

  By the flags at the water’s edge, you half-witted fools.”

  And from thence, as the wearisome years rolled on,

  long after

  Poor Mickey fell down in the water tower to his death,

  Down, down, through bellowing darkness, I carried

  The vision which perished with him like a rocket which falls

  And quenches its light in earth, and hid it for fear

  Of the son of the banker, calling on Plutus* to save me?

  Avenged were you for the shame of a fearful heart,

  Who left me alone till I saw you again in an hour

  When I seemed to be turned to a tree with trunk

  and branches

  Growing indurate, turning to stone, yet burgeoning

  In laurel leaves, in hosts of lambent laurel,

  Quivering, fluttering, shrinking, fighting the numbness

  Creeping into their veins from the dying trunk and branches!

  ’Tis vain, O youth, to fly the call of Apollo.

  Fling yourselves in the fire, die with a song of spring,

  If die you must in the spring. For none shall look

  On the face of Apollo and live, and choose you must

  ’Twixt death in the flame and death after years of sorrow,

  Rooted fast in the earth, feeling the grisly hand,

  Not so much in the trunk as in the terrible numbness

  Creeping up to the laurel leaves that never cease

  To flourish until you fall. O leaves of me

  Too sere for coronal wreaths, and fit alone

  For urns of memory, treasured, perhaps, as themes

  For hearts heroic, fearless singers and livers—

  Delphic Apollo!

  THE SPOONIAD

  THE SPOONIAD

  [The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon River (see page 136), planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The fragment was found among his papers by William Marion Reedy and was for the first time published in Reedy’s Mirror of December 18th, 1914.]

  THE SPOONIAD*

  OF John Cabanis’ wrath and of the strife

  Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat

  Who led the common people in the cause

  Of freedom for Spoon River, and the fall

  Of Rhodes’ bank that brought unnumbered woes

  And loss to many, with engendered hate

  That flamed into the torch in Anarch hands

  To burn the court-house, on whose blackened wreck

  A fairer temple rose and Progress stood—

  Sing, muse, that lit the Chian’s face* with smiles,

  Who saw the ant-like Greeks and Trojans crawl

  About Scamander,* over walls, pursued

  Or else pursuing, and the funeral pyres

  And sacred hecatombs, and first because

  Of Helen who with Paris fled to Troy

  As soul-mate; and the wrath of Peleus’ son,*

  Decreed, to lose Chryseis,* lovely spoil

  Of war, and dearest concubine.

  Say first,

  Thou son of night, called Momus,* from whose eyes

  No secret hides, and Thalia,* smiling one,

  What bred ’twixt Thomas Rhodes and John Cabanis

  The deadly strife? His daughter Flossie, she,

  Returning from her wandering with a troop

  Of strolling players, walked the village streets,

  Her bracelets tinkling and with sparkling rings

  And words of serpent wisdom and a smile

  Of cunning in her eyes. Then Thomas Rhodes,

  Who ruled the church and ruled the bank as well,

  Made known his disapproval of the maid;

  And all Spoon River whispered and the eyes

  Of all the church frowned on her, till she knew

  They feared her and condemned.

  But them to flout

  She gave a dance to viols and to flutes,

  Brought from Peoria, and many youths,

  But lately made regenerate through the prayers

  Of zealous preachers and of earnest souls,

  Danced merrily, and sought her in the dance,

  Who wore a dress so low of neck that eyes

  Down straying might survey the snowy swale

  Till it was lost in whiteness.

  With the dance

  The village changed to merriment from gloom.

  The milliner, Mrs. Williams, could not fill

  Her orders for new hats, and every seamstress

  Plied busy needles making gowns; old trunks

  And chests were opened for their store of laces

  And rings and trinkets were brought out of hiding

  And all the youths fastidious grew of dress;

  Notes passed, and many a fair one’s door at eve

  Knew a bouquet, and strolling lovers thronged

  About the hills that overlooked the river.

  Then, since the mercy seats more empty showed,

  One of God’s chosen lifted up his voice:

  “The woman of Babylon is among us; rise,

  Ye sons of light, and drive the wanton forth!”

  So John Cabanis left the church and left

  The hosts of law and order with his eyes

  By anger cleared, and him the liberal cause

  Acclaimed as nominee to the mayoralty

  To vanquish A. D. Blood.

  But as the war

  Waged bitterly for votes and rumors flew

  About the bank, and of the heavy loans

  Which Rhodes’ son had made to prop his loss

  In wheat, and many drew their coin and left

  The bank of Rhodes more hollow, with the talk

  Among the liberals of another bank

  Soon to be chartered, lo, the bubble burst

  ’Mid cries and curses; but the liberals laughed

  And in the hall of Nicholas Bindle held

  Wise converse and inspiriting debate.

  High on a stage that overlooked the chairs

>   Where dozens sat, and where a pop-eyed daub

  Of Shakespeare, very like the hired man

  Of Christian Dallmann, brown and pointed beard,

  Upon a drab proscenium outward stared,

  Sat Harmon Whitney, to that eminence,

  By merit raised in ribaldry and guile,

  And to the assembled rebels thus he spake:

  “Whether to lie supine and let a clique

  Cold-blooded, scheming, hungry, singing psalms,

  Devour our substance, wreck our banks and drain

  Our little hoards for hazards on the price

  Of wheat or pork, or yet to cower beneath

  The shadow of a spire upreared to curb

  A breed of lackeys and to serve the bank

  Coadjutor in greed, that is the question.

  Shall we have music and the jocund dance,

  Or tolling bells? Or shall young romance roam

  These hills about the river, flowering now

  To April’s tears, or shall they sit at home,

  Or play croquet where Thomas Rhodes may see,

  I ask you? If the blood of youth runs o’er

  And riots ’gainst this regimen of gloom,

  Shall we submit to have these youths and maids

  Branded as libertines and wantons?”

  Ere

  His words were done a woman’s voice called “No!”

  Then rose a sound of moving chairs, as when

  The numerous swine o’er-run the replenished troughs;

  And every head was turned, as when a flock

  Of geese back-turning to the hunter’s tread

  Rise up with flapping wings; then rang the hall

  With riotous laughter, for with battered hat

  Tilted upon her saucy head, and fist

  Raised in defiance, Daisy Fraser stood.

  Headlong she had been hurled from out the hall

  Save Wendell Bloyd, who spoke for woman’s rights,

  Prevented, and the bellowing voice of Burchard.

  Then ’mid applause she hastened toward the stage

  And flung both gold and silver to the cause

  And swiftly left the hall.

  Meantime upstood

  A giant figure, bearded like the son

  Of Alcmene, deep-chested, round of paunch,

  And spoke in thunder: “Over there behold

  A man who for the truth withstood his wife—

  Such is our spirit—when that A. D. Blood